abioGenesis hypothesis: scientific or just a silly idea? What say you?

So basically what you are saying is that it wasn't natural magic that created life from nothing, it was supernatural god-magic that created life from nothing.

Makes total sense...

reply to post by vasaga

Leaving the goal of the hypothesis undefined is not exactly practical. How can you find a pathway to X by leaving X undefined?

The point is that "life" is undefinable. The goal in Szostak's case is to achieve the proposed self-replicating protocell by a plausible chemical pathway. That would be a huge milestone as it would be the start of an evolutionary process.

Yeah.. The problem with this line of thinking is that it assumes that life is nothing more than the sum of its parts. That's borderline composition fallacy.

The assumption - for the sake of discussion - was that the bacterial cell is the result of an evolutionary process. This implies a long line of small, incremental changes from a state that most would call non-living to a state that is considered living. Not sure how composition fallacy would apply.

Well, there's already evidence for it. It's just a shift in perspective while still supporting the evidence we already have. It's basically a theory of everything where a bunch of things suddenly fall into place that were huge problems before. I wouldn't know how to test it, but maybe there can be some mathematical proofs.

Can you give an example of one such thing that falls into place?

For what exactly? For how life started? I have no reason to support a single perspective because none of them have enough evidence and thus are unsatisfying.

Fair enough.

Theoretically abiogenesis is not impossible. From a practical standpoint, I think it's highly improbable.

More improbable than any other explanation? If so, based on what?

What do you mean see it happen? People would make it happen.

No, they wouldn't. They would set up the conditions, which is obviously not the same thing. The proposition is that under the specified conditions (starting materials, energy sources, atmosphere, temperature, pressure, pH etc.) certain chemical reactions can be demonstrated to happen. To claim that these reactions could only happen through intelligent intervention is to claim that this specific set of conditions could not possibly have existed naturally. This argument is sort of self-defeating because if it could be proven that a specific set of conditions could not exist naturally, the experiment would obviously not be run using these conditions.

reply to post by radix

The assumption - for the sake of discussion - was that the bacterial cell is the result of an evolutionary process.

Reading this back, I realize it needs clarification. The assumption - again, for the sake of discussion - was that the first bacterial cell (or the first cell that would be generally agreed to be alive) was the result of an evolutionary process. The bacteria we see today are of course the result of an evolutionary process. This is not an assumption, it's an observable fact. We wouldn't need to develop new antibiotics if bacteria didn't evolve.